She was eyeing me, as though bereft of speech, when I addressed her.
‘I will accompany you,’ she exclaimed.
‘No! It is out of the question.’
‘Why?’ she cried imperiously, with the irritability of dismay and dread in her manner.
‘I shall be on deck till four. Such a spell of exposure it will be needless for you to undergo. You are perfectly safe in your cabin.’
‘How dare you ask me to return to that horrible lonely part of the ship?’ she cried, with wrath and alarm brilliant in her eyes.
‘Then take some rest upon that locker there.’
‘You ask me to remain here alone with the dead body close to in that cabin?’
‘Miss Temple,’ said I firmly, ‘if you decline to return to your cabin, you will at least oblige me by staying in this cuddy. I have no time to reason with you. You must obey me, if you please. Give me your hand.’ She extended it, and I conducted her to the sofa locker, on which I gently but resolutely compelled her to seat herself. ‘You can rest here with perfect safety,’ I went on. ‘I am astonished that a woman of your spirit should find anything to render you uneasy, in the face of the real difficulties which confront us, in the neighbourhood of a harmless corpse. I can command a view of you and of this interior through that skylight. But you must not come on deck.’
She watched me in a motionless posture with an air of haughty resentment upon her lips, to which a kind of awe in her gaze gave the lie. I left her, and had my foot upon the companion steps, when a thought occurred to me. Going to the door of the captain’s berth, I withdrew the wedge, and entered and picked up the pistol that lay upon the deck. It was a heavy single-barrelled concern, but a firearm all the same, and I thrust it into my breast. I perceived no materials for loading it; but I had what was necessary in that way below; and now I was possessed, as I did not doubt, of the only two pistols in the ship.